A house style
for a cultural
platform.
This is not a logo file. It is the operating manual of Art Kelen — the language, the texture, the discipline by which the platform recognises itself in any room, in any language, on any surface.
Six words that do the work.
Every choice in this manual flows from these six. When in doubt about a colour, a sentence, a layout, return to these. If the choice doesn't serve at least one, it is the wrong choice.
Nothing on Art Kelen is accidental. Every artwork, sentence, exhibition, and image has passed through Daffa. The brand reads like a curator's choice, not a feed.
The platform speaks in essays, not captions. Long sentences are welcome. Headlines breathe. Whitespace is treated as a material, not a budget shortfall.
African contemporary art is the centre, not the niche. The colour, motif, and language register honour that lineage without folklore or pastiche.
Three languages, three regions, many makers. The system is built so French, English, and Arabic each look at home — none of them is the translation of another.
The platform is slower than its competitors on purpose. Two long-form pieces a month, named contributors, real edit passes. Tempo is the differentiator.
There is always a person behind the work — Daffa, the artist, the curator, the writer. Bylines, signatures, and faces are part of the visual language.
The brand is not what we put on the page. It is the test we run before anything goes on the page.
Operating principleTwo words. Always together.
"Art Kelen" is one name written as two words, in Latin script, in this exact case. It is never translated. It is never abbreviated. It is never set in all caps as the wordmark — though it may appear in caps inside a sentence rendered in a mono register.
The English word, in the English sense — but inclusive of the African and African-diaspora traditions that the platform centres. Not "fine art" in the European drawing-room sense. Not "crafts." Art as cultural production with weight.
From the Bambara word for "one" — the unifying principle. One platform, one editorial voice, one curator at the centre. Pronounced keh-len, two even syllables. The "K" is hard.
Rule — "Art Kelen" and "Daffa Konaté" remain in Latin script in all three languages, including Arabic. They are never transliterated to Arabic script (آرت كيلن is wrong). They are proper nouns first, English words second.
A voice that sounds like Daffa, not like a brand.
When a visitor reads Art Kelen, they should feel that a person wrote it — specifically, the curator. The voice is editorial, considered, occasionally personal, never corporate. The three rules below settle most disputes.
Sentences, not bullets.
The default form is a paragraph. Bullets are for receipts and shopping lists. If a thought can survive as a sentence, it must — even on cards, even in captions.
Specific, not aspirational.
"A painter from Tunis, four works under €5,000" beats "discover incredible African artists." Names, places, prices, dates — always preferred to atmosphere.
Third person for Daffa.
On structural pages — About, Consultancy, Press — Daffa is "she." The "I" voice is reserved for The Letter and signed editorial. The distinction is intentional.
If a piece of copy could appear unchanged on the website of a SaaS company or a tourism board, it is not Art Kelen copy. Rewrite it.
The voice testOne symbol. Three folded planes.
The Art Kelen mark is a single form built from three faceted panes — a rounded head, a triangle, a descending tongue — outlined in gold and tinted in three soft paper values. It reads as a folded paper, a kelen in motion, an abstract figure leaning forward. It is a quiet form that carries the platform.
Space is part of the mark. Always protect it.
The exclusion zone equals the height of the italic A inside the symbol — called x. Nothing — text, ruled line, image edge, button — encroaches inside that zone. This rule applies on every surface, every size, every context.
Approved size ladder
The mark works across a wide range, but it has limits. Below 16 pixels it loses the italic character. Above 240 pixels it should be paired with the wordmark, not floated alone.
Floor — 22 px is the absolute minimum. Below that, the three panes start to blur into one — use the wordmark "Art Kelen" set in Cormorant 14 / 500 italic instead.
Symbol, wordmark, founder lockup. Three approved forms.
There are three official forms of the brand on a surface. Symbol alone, wordmark alone, or the founder lockup — symbol with "Daffa Konaté · Art Kelen." No fourth form is approved.
The mark cannot be edited, stretched, or recoloured.
These six examples cover roughly 90% of the misuses that turn up in the wild. Treat the symbol as a fixed asset — like a signature.
Don't stretch or distort. The proportions of the three panes are fixed. Scale uniformly, both axes, every time.
Don't rotate or tilt. The mark sits at its drawn angle — already leaning forward. Don't rotate it further. No tilts, no "creative" angles.
Don't apply gradients. The mark's gold outline and three paper fills are fixed. No rainbow gradients, no drop shadows, no bevels.
Don't recolour. Only the gold-on-paper original, the ink-reverse, and the terracotta-reverse are approved. Royal blue, magenta, neon — never.
Don't place on a busy field. The mark needs a clean field of paper, ink, or terracotta. Patterned, photographic, or noisy backgrounds break it.
Don't darken or desaturate. The gold-and-paper register is the brand. Adjusting saturation or brightness to "tone it down" reads as a third-rate version of the mark, not a subtler one.
A palette of paper, ink, and one fire.
The system is small on purpose. Two papers, an ink, one terracotta, three textiles, three accents. Every colour has a job. Nothing is decorative.
Core
Supporting
Textile accents
Allocation — roughly 60% paper or warm white, 25% ink and charcoal, 10% terracotta, 5% textile accents combined. Keep the ratio. The platform should read as paper-and-ink with one fire — not as a rainbow.
Six pairings cover almost everything.
Use these as defaults. Editorial pages, marketing surfaces, social tiles — pick a pairing from below and stay inside it. Mixing more than two pairings on one surface is the most common drift.
the conversation.
from the founder.
14 March.
in Tunis.
no. 6.
retrospective.
Three families. One conversation.
Cormorant Garamond carries display and headline. Lora carries body. DM Mono carries the editorial machinery — eyebrows, captions, metadata, page numbers. Together they read as a magazine, not a website.
A high-contrast Garamond revival with a properly drawn italic. Used for h1–h3, the wordmark, lede paragraphs, and any quotation set big. Italic is its native register — lean into it.
A calm serif with subtly calligraphic terminals. Used for body copy, card text, captions over 13 px, and anything the visitor reads in paragraphs.
A humanist monospace. Used for eyebrows, micro-captions, metadata, dates, prices, indices, the editorial machinery. Always set in letter-spacing.
Pairing principles
Italic is the headline.
Where two words are joined, the second is set in Cormorant italic and tinted terracotta. "A platform becomes." This is the platform's signature gesture.
Mono sits above the serif.
Every section opens with a mono eyebrow set in caps and letter-spacing. The eyebrow numbers the section. The serif follows, big and quiet.
Lora carries the reading.
Body copy never goes into a sans. Lora is the platform's reading face — if a paragraph survives at 15.5 px in Lora, it belongs. If not, it doesn't.
Eight rungs. No more.
The whole platform uses these eight type sizes. If a designer reaches for a ninth, the answer is to pick the closest rung. Restraint is the strategy.
How the three families sit together.
Two real examples — an editorial open and a signed Letter — showing the type system at work. Eyebrow above, italic headline, ital lede, Lora body, mono byline.
to the art world.
The studio sits above a courtyard in the medina. Light comes in from the north, sharp and cool, the way she likes it. On the wall, the paintings from the spring are still up, waiting.
"I always come back to calligraphy," she says. "The hand has a memory."
Art Dubai.
The third — a painter from Tunis — is the one I want you to see first. Her work has been quietly accumulating weight, and a serious collector will recognise that.
If any of this is useful, an hour together while I am in town would be the best use of it.
Six approved surfaces. No invented ones.
The brand has a small library of textures, each with a specific role. They are not interchangeable. The halo belongs behind the founder portrait. The hairline cross belongs at the back of the consultancy hero. The kente grid belongs on posters and Letter masthead.
Hand-held, ambient-lit, edited like a magazine.
No stock. No studio sterility. No filters above mild grain. The platform's photographic register is studio visits, vernissage moments, hands at work, ambient light from a window — never the over-saturated, evenly-lit catalogue image.
Ambient light, not flash.
The light source is the window, the lamp, the open doorway. Flash photography flattens the skin tone and erases the texture of the work. Avoid.
Warm tones, not cool.
White-balance pulls slightly warm — toward 5200K rather than 6500K. Cool tones (blue cast, cold skin) read as journalistic; warm tones read as editorial.
Hands and edges.
Show the hands working, the edge of the canvas, the brush mid-stroke. Never the wide-angle gallery wall shot. The body of work is always close.
Named, never stock.
Every photograph credits the artist, the studio, the moment. If a photograph can't be credited, it cannot run. Stock photography is forbidden on Art Kelen surfaces — every surface.
Thin line. One stroke. No fills.
The icon system is a single weight — 1.4 px stroke, no fills, rounded joins — sitting on a 24 px grid. The whole library reads as a single hand-drawn set, not as a bag of mixed icons pulled from the web.
12 columns. One left-anchored axis.
The platform sits on a 12-column grid, 18 px gutter, max 1240 px container. The side-nav sits at 268 px, left-aligned. The layout is asymmetric on purpose — left-weighted, never centered. Centering signals brochure; left-weight signals editorial.
Reading line — body copy maintains a 60–70 character measure. Wider columns (8+ cols of body copy) are forbidden — eye fatigue rises sharply above 75 characters, and the brand reads "uneditorial" past that line.
Three languages, each at home.
Art Kelen is published in English, French, and Arabic. None of the three is the translation of another — each is written in its own register. The Arabic edition is set in Noto Naskh Arabic; the layout is fully right-to-left. "Art Kelen" and "Daffa Konaté" remain in Latin script in all three.
Direction — on Arabic surfaces, the whole layout flips RTL: nav on the right, eyebrow lines on the right, image-text reading order right to left. The mark stays oriented as drawn; the italic A is not mirrored.
Four things that never change.
These rules cross every language, every surface, every region, every product line. If a deliverable breaks one of these, it is not on-brand — full stop.
Translation rule — these four names are not translated. They are proper nouns of the platform. Alternatives ("Newsletter", "Member Bulletin", "Patron Report", "آرت كيلن") are not approved and should not be used in any language, on any surface.
The brand in the world.
Four surfaces, four registers: a business card, a social tile, an email signature, a vernissage poster. Together they cover roughly 80% of the off-platform contexts the brand needs to live in.
Konaté.
Cultural platform · membership · consultancy
art-kelen.com · hello@art-kelen.com
in Tunis,
opened.
Eight things that are off-brand, always.
These appear regularly in early drafts, in third-party templates, and in well-meaning agency work. They are off-brand whether they look pretty or not. Refuse them by name.
Stock photography.
Every photograph carries a credit. If the credit reads "iStock", the image cannot run. There is no exception, including for "placeholders" — placeholders ship.
Emoji as design.
The brand uses one typographic accent — ✦ — for the marquee and section breaks. Other emoji (🎨 🌍 ✨) and emoji-heavy copy are out. The platform reads as editorial, not as a brand-Twitter account.
Sans-serif body copy.
Lora is the reading face. Helvetica, Inter, system-ui — none of them are approved for body copy. They flatten the editorial register the brand depends on.
Pure white (#FFFFFF).
The platform never uses pure white as a surface. Paper-white is #FAF5EB; warm-white is #F2EBDC. Pure white is the colour of error screens — it shouldn't appear in the brand.
"Curated" as adjective.
The platform is curated — that's the structural promise. The word doesn't need to appear in marketing copy. If "curated" shows up in a sentence, cut it; the work shows it.
Latin caps on Arabic surfaces.
On Arabic editions, English captions (FROM THE FOUNDER, MONTHLY REPORT) are translated, not left in English. The only Latin allowed on Arabic surfaces is "Art Kelen" and "Daffa Konaté" — the named invariants.
Drop shadows on the mark.
The mark sits on a surface, not over it. No drop shadows, no glows, no bevels, no "float" effects. The brand is flat by design.
Centered layouts.
The default alignment is left (or right, in Arabic). Centered headlines and centered body copy read as brochure work — they are reserved for the closing flourish only, never the main body of a page.
A brand is the discipline of saying no
to almost everything.
This document does not exist to make designs prettier. It exists to make the platform recognisable — to a collector in Paris, an artist in Lagos, a curator in Dubai, in any language, on any surface.
Refer to it. Cite it by section. When in doubt, return to the six essence words.
Brand Guidelines · v1.0
art-kelen.com · @artkelen